


Oh, but it hurts to remember

by zigostia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Possible Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 16:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13298931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zigostia/pseuds/zigostia
Summary: Hanahaki Disease is a disease where the victim coughs up flower petals when they suffer from one-sided love.Sherlock holds the poppy between his fingers.He squeezes hard, watches it bloom a dark, wine-coloured bruise.





	Oh, but it hurts to remember

There has been a strange tugging in his chest for the better half of a week, that Sherlock dismisses in the usual way he does with the behaviours of his body. Something inhaled, something injured, something forgotten—the possibilities were all there. Ignoring it was a simple task.

Up until now, because, now, the sensation becomes relentless and turns to something corporeal as it swoops up his throat, and all of a sudden there’s this _lurch_ and his throat convulses and he is vomiting all over his bed.

He drops to his knees, his mind falling victim to his body as he grips the edge of the mattress with white-knuckled hands.

When it is over, Sherlock stares at his sheets.

Tiny red poppies with tiny black hearts stare back.

Sherlock stares. He stares and stares and stares at what his traitorous lungs had sent up and out, a dull roaring in his ears accentuated by a spiked, erratic pulse that drowns out his heavy breathing.

His phone buzzes.

_Oh, dear. MH_

Sherlock quickly begins to scan the room, but gives up mid-way. His fingers are shaking as they type.

_Fuck off_

His vision is too sharp, the colour contrast too big. The edges on the petals are fierce scarlet razors. His head spins with staggering implication.

He's a sociopath with a wicked honed whip as a mind. No one dared to invoke the flowers in his lungs.

But it takes much less than Sherlock Holmes to know that this is not a question of whom.

Another buzz of his phone.

 

 _I’m bringing home leftovers, and dont even_  
bother because i will tie you to a chair and  
force feed you if you force my hand

 

Despite everything and against his will, Sherlock smiles. The message sends embers aglow inside his chest.

And it’s obvious now, so blindingly obvious that his stomach lurches again, and it has substance, now—flowers spearing down with black, jagged roots.

Sherlock picks up a poppy from the bed. It’s soft, amazingly so, like red spiderweb silk.

He holds it between his fingers and squeezes hard, watches it bruise in a dark, wine-coloured stain.

-+-+-+-

Frankly, the entire thing was quite ridiculous: they don't love you back? Snap your fingers—now you're throwing up flowers.

One-sided, that was the most common, but then there was the topic of requited-but-neither-confessed, the emotional stability, the whole schtick with denial, and there were so many variations that it just made it all the more ridiculous.

People insisted there was a purpose to the disease, attempting at a meaningful analogy in the form of all-lowercase poetry, seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses.

Sherlock took it as a vexatious inconvenience like sleeping and eating that evolution, for some bizarre reason, had not eliminated yet.

From frivolous crushes to desperate devotion, small stray petals to great billowing blossoms—they certainly had no place in the life of Sherlock Holmes.

(Not after he had grown up, at least. After he had known better. After the nights with his knees drawn up to his chest, face down, humiliated tears smearing the pressed collar of his shirt, surrounded by scattered petals. Hands clasped over his ears to muffle the noises from a floor below, where they (they, always they, they were just two people, nothing else—to be a parent, truly, you needed much more than what _they_ gave) threw things and said things that Sherlock had deleted long ago.

He learned quickly, found a way to sever himself from the pain, the stupid, stupid emotions. It was much easier that way.)

To Sherlock Holmes, flowers were a weakness, easy to exploit, blossoms spelling out broken hearts: a fragment of a peony petal, stuck in the bottom of the toilet bowl, makes or breaks an alias, revealing a motive and a murder.

He prided himself on his scientific mind, focused on the more practical things than emotions, love.

Which was why, which was precisely the reason why, he was so angry, so completely, so utterly _furious,_ at John Watson.

-+-+-+-

John throws up magnolias a day after they meet.

It not unusual: he’s had his fair share of broken hearts.

But it’s different this time, this time it _aches,_ even when he watches the flowers swirl down the drain, it’s still there, a relentless twitch that flits around his mind and lingers in his lungs.

He tells himself he’ll get over it.

He doesn’t.

And so John clutches, to a never-ending chain of failed romances, trailing behind tiny blue petals. A sorry excuse that causes indefinitely less pain than his Sherlockian magnolias that bloom with singleminded desperation, that burn as they spill up and out.

Fleeting looks, soft smile. The chaste touch of a best friend. John is Sherlock’s blogger, partner, flatmate. It’s better this way.

It’s enough. It has to be.

-+-+-+-

Everyone who meets him assumes that he has taken the surgery.

Sherlock doesn’t blame them—removing the ability to produce the flowers leaves the patient void of any emotion, a reticent shell of a man, they say. Apathetic and cold. You will never throw up flowers again.

But Sherlock had never needed surgery to be able to do so.

Had.

Now, poppies dance in the air and they won’t disappear. They surround him in a flurry of red and black, plummeting him with silken petals that remind him of lips.

He opens his eyes with a snarl.

Sherlock arranges a surgery at six.

-+-+-+-

5:30. Sherlock springs up from his chair and strides to the door.

“Where are you going?”

Sherlock grabs his coat. “Out.”

“Where exactly _out?”_

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because I wouldn’t particularly like it if you were to put yourself into some insanely dangerous situation tonight—at least, not without me.”

John puts down his paper and smiles through the corner of his mouth.

Sherlock looks back, unreadable, impassive.

He opens the door and walks out.

“Oh, for—”

Sherlock breaks into a run, down the stairs and out the building, across the streets. He runs and runs and doesn’t stop until he’s in a dark alleyway, where he bends over beside the wall and vomits.

It lasts longer this time.

His throat is raw as he spits out the last of the petals. He presses a hand to his chest—he can very nearly feel them growing again, already prepared for the next chance to flurry up his throat.

The alley floor is bestrewn with a patch of red and black, rippling out from where he kneels. To the left, they merge with another of the like; pale pink peonies. Along the wall, more. A display of mementos.

There is a morbid sort of beauty in here.

His poppies smell of subtle earth; the peonies cast their crisp, clean scent. It mingles with the musk of rot from the old and withered.

His own contribution, Sherlock thinks, and laughs.

Sherlock exits the alleyway and heads for the hospital.

He almost makes it.

He recognizes the footsteps as they approach, and he doesn't flinch when a hand grips his shoulder and swings him around.

John.  _You’ve ruined me_ Sherlock thinks, and damn it all.

“What are you doing here?”

“None of your business,” Sherlock replies, cool and curt.

John’s eyes go hard. Sherlock’s eyes dart down to his hands, balled into fists.

“Actually, it _is.”_

“In what way?”

“I care about you. You’re my best friend.”

And that should be enough but it’s never enough, not for Sherlock, who wants more, always more—that’s why his lungs are filled with flowers.

John’s face softens.

“Hey, look—if it's really... you don’t have to tell me.” He sighs. “I just wish you would.”

“It’s nothing,” Sherlock says, and it’s not logical, it’s not right, how much it hurts to see John’s fallen face.

“Right.” John coughs and looks away. “In that case, I’m going home.”

Sherlock nods.

Pause. Neither of them move.

John’s face flickers with hesitation. He takes a step closer.

In a sudden motion, he tucks a tumbled curl of hair behind Sherlock’s left ear.

Hastily, John turns and he hurries away.

It's 5:50. 

Sherlock touches where John's fingers left tingles on his skin. Presses his fingertips to his chest where a heart desperately beats.

The surgery asphyxiates all emotion.  _You won't ever feel this again._

Sherlock turns his back to the hospital doors and follows John home.

The next morning, Sherlock makes some scathing remark and John smiles at him and does it again, brushing back Sherlock’s hair as he walks past. The touch of his fingers unfurl fractals of fire.

Sherlock blasts Shepard tones so John won’t hear him in the bathroom (he says it’s for an experiment).

-+-+-+-

He catalogues spots around the city that are safe. Designated areas.

Sherlock adheres to the typical case study of a contractor of the disease, except that his symptoms are progressing devastatingly fast.

If the disease was contagious, it would most certainly cause an epidemic: the spells last longer and longer until you’re dashing to the bathroom every hour, until they grow in you faster than you can throw them up, your lungs screaming for air, your windpipe stuffed with flowers.

How morbid. How fascinating.

John comes close to finding out on multiple occasions. Rounding the corner to find Sherlock doubled up on the ground. Catching a forgotten poppy stuck to his coat.

John makes it worse, so much worse.

His face goes tight with worry when Sherlock lies about tripping, a hand on his forehead before letting it fall, landing on his cheek for a fraction of a second (it _blazes)_. He plucks the poppy from his coat and weaves it into Sherlock’s hair with warm fingers. Moments like those, everything about him is soft: hands and eyes and lips that Sherlock tries so hard not to look at.

It's a distraction from the Work, the shining centre of his life from which he pledges upon.

Sherlock grows snappish and razor-sharp. John falls into a pursed-lip silence as Sherlock hurls insults, stays quiet when Sherlock somehow runs out of his neverending torrent and stands, eyes flashing with mirth and fury but unable to say a word. John is terrible and wonderful and ferociously patient, and his smiles send the flowers in Sherlock's lungs into feverish frenzy.

With every attempt as Sherlock will to distance him, John so easily falls right back into the verboten home he has made in Sherlock’s mind and body.

Sherlock tries, oh, how he tries.

He cannot fall out of love with John Watson.

-+-+-+-

John is going on a date with someone whose name Sherlock deletes the moment John tells him.

It’s a movie. How boring.

John frets around the flat, searching for that one navy jacket. It’s in his wardrobe at the very bottom, but Sherlock doesn’t tell John this.

John finds it, and spends half an hour in the bathroom, fussing with his hair and smoothing out the creases in his pants.

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock raises his head from the microscope in a careless kind of way.

“How do I look?”

Sherlock shoves the flowers in his lungs until they yield into a lazy flit. He turns to look.

Before he realises, Sherlock is out of his chair and moving. When he regains control of his limbs, he’s standing less than a metre away and the lazy flit has devolved into an untamed hurricane.

John looks devastating. His eyes have turned to nebulae.

“There’s a water stain on your collar.”

John blinks, twists his head. “Oh. That’ll dry.”

“There’s a spot of shaving cream on the back of your neck.”

John twists the other way and searches for the spot with a hand.

“Left. My left, not yours. More to the front. No, your front.”

“Where?”

Sherlock reaches over and swipes with his thumb. “There.”

John smiles. “Thanks.”

Pause. Neither moves.

Sherlock’s hand rests at the back of John’s neck. A lively pulse thrums beneath the skin, beats against the pad of Sherlock’s thumb.

John swallows.

“Don’t wait up."

“Don’t intend to.”

“Bye, Sherlock,” and he’s turning, heading out the door to his date.

Sherlock watches, watches, as John leaves. He dashes to the window to see him walk to the side of the street and call for a cab.

John has meticulously taken his heart apart with the irreprochable precision of an army doctor.

John didn’t have a spot of shaving cream on the back of his neck.

-+-+-+-

Sherlock throws himself into the work. He scours his blog for questions, paces around the flat and all across London, in a fruitless attempt to curb his agitation.

He keeps a graph in his mind of the poppies over time. The line swoops dangerously high.

He takes on a case that he knows is too risky. While John is at their flat, researching on the background behind an ancient china vase that has no correlation whatsoever to the murders, Sherlock traces the suspect’s steps and enters alone.

When John finally finds him, the killer is bound and gagged and Sherlock is collapsed on the floor next to him.

Sherlock opens his eyes and they focus on John, once, before he is gone.

His mouth forms a stubborn line, his lips tightly pressed together—his mouth is filled with flowers.

John doesn’t know this.

John sits with him as they wait for the police. He brushes back matted hair and ghosts his fingers over all the sharp angles of Sherlock’s face.

Sherlock comes back to the world in the back of an ambulance truck and he refuses to speak. He knocks over the glass of water a nurse holds to his lips and glares. When they turn their back on him, Sherlock swallows furiously and chokes them down.

Sherlock stumbles out into the night and right into John.

“I’m trying very, very hard not to hit you,” John says, even as he takes Sherlock by the shoulders and scans him up and down with eyes filled with nothing but concern.

Sherlock's voice is thick. The swallowed petals stick to his throat. “It was better if I went alone.”

The grip on his shoulders tighten to the point of pain.

“Shut up,” John hisses. “Shut up. It’s not better. It’s never better, goddamnit, Sherlock.” His face twists—grief and anger and something else that makes Sherlock’s throat seize up.

“I have to go.” He turns away.

“What? Sherlock!”

But Sherlock is gone, dashing to a spot in the backyard behind the house.

He slips behind the tool shed, braces himself against the damp and dusty wall, and bends over.

Halfway through, he realises that something is terribly wrong. He slams his lips together but he keeps convulsing and the petals force themselves past, spill out and over.

It’s another minute before he manages to stem the flow enough to turn around.

Lestrade’s face is contorted with horror and shock. His eyes flick up to Sherlock and they fill, suddenly, with pity.

Sherlock seethes. He glares, one that says, _tell anyone and I’ll kill you,_ and that’s all he can manage before he can’t stand it anymore and goes down again.

Just in case he wasn’t clear enough, when Sherlock is finished he walks past Lestrade and whispers it into his ear.

-+-+-+-

Moriarty is smart, very smart, much more than Sherlock had stupidly assumed.

Sherlock fights back with everything he has, but John’s eyes are seeds and his voice wills them to bloom, his touch draws the opium from the flowers and seeps them into Sherlock’s blood, heady and intoxicating and so dangerously distracting.

John stands by him no matter what people say. John is right next to Sherlock and taking it all, solid and fierce and deathly loyal.

In the end, Sherlock gives up pushing him away. He lets himself believe something that isn't true, because he is selfish, even to himself.

The poppies come with the territory.

-+-+-+-

He knows better, now, when it’s too late.

It would’ve been best, he knows, if he walked through those hospital doors that first night—if he arranged another—or another, or another.

He imagines a life with no poppies. John is merely a flatmate, a sidekick to accompany his cases—just a friend.

He cannot.

He is alarmed but not surprised.

-+-+-+-

Goodbye, John.

_Look what you’ve done to me._

The phone clatters to the floor;

Those planted seeds, now watch them grow

(Oh, but it hurts to remember.)

Sherlock spreads his arms and falls.

-+-+-+-

_Please, no, please, he’s my friend—_

Push through the crowd.

And stand.

Stare.

There is a dark spot growing, trickling down the cracks of the pavement. Rivlets of rich scarlet red run down his face.

Poppies are overflowing from his mouth.

They are the biggest flowers John has ever seen.

Pale, pale wrist; no thrum beneath the skin. John presses a hand to his cheek, feels the warmth already draining away _._

Paramedics pull him to the side. John doesn’t even struggle. The world tilts and sways on a stormy sea.

They leave him on the floor and turn their attention to the other

_(ohjesuspleaseno)_

John is being sucked under, his lungs filling with icy water that drown and crack his blue magnolias.

Sherlock leaves a trail of flowers fluttering behind his stretcher. The poppies twirl in the breeze and land soft kisses on John's skin.

**Author's Note:**

> I was surprised that there wasn't already a fic for this, so here's my take on it. I hope it turned out OK!
> 
> Now with a fantastic-brilliant-amazing cover by the lovely allsovacant <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Cover] Oh, But It Hurts to Remember](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15219842) by [allsovacant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/allsovacant/pseuds/allsovacant)




End file.
